US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants The self-described "gay furry hackers" of SiegedSec are back: this time boasting they've broken into America's biggest nuclear power lab's computer systems and stolen records on thousands of employees. Some of that data has already been leaked, it appears. SiegedSec, which also claimed to have breached NATO's IT security on …
The same people who believe having an ultra-strong, cat-brained mecha-cat-girl companion would be a "safe" companion are the same sort of people who also believe the "self-driving" feature of Tesla cars is "safe."
If we're making SF-cat-related wishes, I'd prefer to have MUGHI* from Dirty Pair as an assistant: zero in sexy department, 90% in the hella-scary-looking department, and 1000%+ in the usefulness department. "Fly the ship, MUGHI." (MUGHI doesn't speak, but sits down and flies the ship.)
*"Military Utility Genetic Hiper [sic] Intelligence."
How about a cat-brained tank
Or a cat-flown parasite gunship, killing evil nasties that want to eat human brains in "The Game of Rat and Dragon".. (Cordwainer Smith 1950's era scifi.. another of his was "Scanners live in vain" that also has humans being modified to resist the "pain of space" that drives people mad and eventually kills them)
Cat-brain may have been a joke, or maybe not (it was old and had been left unused for hundreds of years on that planet as I recall).
The title of the episode was "Miri" from the name of the "teenage" girl that fell in love with Captain Kirk. That same actress also played a leading role in 'True Grit', the one with John Wayne.
geek factor: 8
Us bipedal monkeys and what we can do – and make of ourselves – are still the scariest thing I can think of. The Kzinti are – heh! – pussies compared to the Draka. Not to mention... What were they called, those pitch-black high-G-planet-reared genetically-designed war machines, also the products of Pournelle’s (and Niven’s?) imagination(s)... The Saurons, I think.
If we're making SF-cat-related wishes, I'd prefer to have MUGHI* from Dirty Pair as an assistant: zero in sexy department, 90% in the hella-scary-looking department, and 1000%+ in the usefulness department.
Hmm.. Not strictly a cat person, but has claws and goes by the name of Rose Kolodny, or Steppin' Razor. My kinda woman though
"The same people who believe having an ultra-strong, cat-brained mecha-cat-girl companion would be a "safe" companion are the same sort of people who also believe the "self-driving" feature of Tesla cars is "safe." who've never owned a cat."
Fixed that for you.
I'd like to believe it's more of on the other end of the spectrum. They've had too many cats that the toxoplasma gondii virus has gotten to their brains and rewired them...
Source: https://healthland.time.com/2011/08/18/crazy-cat-love-caused-by-parasitic-infection/
I can't argue too strenuously against your point. Some distinguish between mysteries and science fiction - I'm one of them. Many fields are bedeviled by the lumper/splitter argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters
I'm obvious a splitter, while you're a lumper. At their extreme, lumpers would take anything that tells a story in pictures, accompanied by words, as a graphic novel. I, on the other hand, distinguish between manga and manhwa, And even though I see Marvel and DC as fitting in the same bucket (much as they'd hate it) I would split off Archie and Disney.
Now about that Bayeux Tapestry ...
All the U.S. National Laboratories have been under sustained outside attacks since the launch of the Department of Defense’s AARO website in August.
Conspiracy nutters are absolutely convinced that the National Laboratory system is sitting on all the UFO evidence in order to hoard all the technological advancements for themselves and/or maintain the secrecy of their relationship with extraterrestrials.
It has become a big enough problem that the labs keep sending out organization wide messages about avoiding spear phishing attacks, reminding people to guard their electronic devices, and they’ve been changing emails in staff directories to reduce the amount of spam that specifically targeted individuals have been receiving.
With the sheer volume of attacks they’ve been getting it was only a matter of time before the cat-people broke through. As everyone knows, the female cat people were wiped out by the Lizard People’s 5G broadcast attack in 2020. The remaining male cat-people population is lonely, so they’re desperate.
The obvious solution would be for the US to invent a vast number of oddly named and apparently redundant overlapping agencies to act as decoys for the conspiracy theorists - while keeping the real governing bodies secret.... that that's exactly what they're doing.
I mean, sure, who hasn't heard about the National Laboratories... But I thought they were all on the coasts. Who ever heard of the National Laboratory Idaho? Gotta be one of them decoys.
I've seen what cats do to lizards!
We had a Siamese cat when I was younger [1] - the only prey she ever caught was a lizards tail.. She startled it while it was sunning itself on a nice warm spot (she probably wanted the warm spot too) and it dropped its tail.
She was sooo proud.
[1] She was the runt of the litter and the breeder sold her to us cheaply because "she probably won't live long". She died of cancer at 22 and, if not for the cancer, would probably have gone on a fair amount further. She was an atypical Siamese cat in that she barely had two braincells to rub together.. She grew up with the boxer dog we also got at much the same time and, when that dog went she stopped eating. So my parents got another boxer and she started eating again.
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"We're willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating IRL catgirls we will take down this post," the group said.
They claim to be gay furries but want them to research catgirls. Also, the trope in furry circles is "make me my fursona". Also speaking as an actual gay furry hacker, our demands would be more along the lines of make Bowser real, pay me in 14 werewolf daddies, and get Tony the Tiger to return to open an account on BlueSky.
Catgirls is much more likely a reference to the anime concept WHICH AREN'T EVEN FURRY! CAT EARS DON'T MAKE YOU FURRY! This is an anime nerd false flag!
There's a few varieties of Furry: From the Anthropomorphic Animal to the hybrid human-animal. So cat ears on a human would be 'furry' to some. After all, Miqo'te do have a fan following. Flip side I seem to recall several Dr Who episodes from the newer series with Cat-Nuns and a Cat-taxi driver? So there's some inspiration, right there.
However, the Puma sisters aren't biological cat-girls: They're androids (gynoids). So perhaps get a robotics / cybernetics lab to research developing cat-girl androids might be better if that's the aim.
Darn - Forgot Ace being transformed into a cat-girl with Silvester McCoy as the Doctor. Really need to go back and watch that one again.
New Dr Who has a couple of episodes with the cat-people on Nu Earth - know they were in the story with the Face of Bo when he/it was dying. And with the drivers trapped underground. Really good effects in those ones.
I'm a fan of manga/anime/hentai and the catgirl theme is indeed very popular (the Japanese people generally love cats which makes them alright in my book).
However while I love and respect girls, and love and respect my cat... I would suggest that combining the two would be, let's say suboptimal.
Might as well nuke the planet from orbit and be done with it. ;-) ;-)
She was.. Furry nice.
Gets coat.
Actually did read somewhere that at least theoretically with the right amount of genetic tinkering it might be possible to modify a house cat to have a higher intelligence.
Whether it would be possible to make it as smart as say a gorilla is unclear, then the limiting factor would be developmental.
An average cat lives at most a handful of years, not enough time to learn anything useful even with optimal teaching methods.
Perhaps a better option might be to write the genetic code from scratch, once the key to human level intelligence is known designing a body able to house a brain
that can think and reason at human level but only be a third of the mass isn't ridiculous if you look at Homo floresiensis or one of the other archaics.
There are a number of optimizations present in the human brain due to evolution but if starting from scratch might not be needed.
That's starting from the proposition that cats aren't already more intelligent than humans.
I go out to work (my rear end off), spend some of that money on keeping my cat well fed, looked after, with a number of comfly places to sleep around my gaff and keep him safe from threats.
If he wants feeding, I do his bidding on pain of a clawing.
He can also come and go as he wants through an always semi-open window.
So... which, between the two of us, is fundamentally the cleverer? And which of us is better equipped to survive?
;-)
Staff, not servants.
Got me thinking, an alien ecosystem might yield something that has superhuman intelligence but has a fraction of the body mass because alien biology.
Could the infamous "Black-eyed children" be something this?
What about the Grey aliens?
I often wonder if the strange reports of elves, faerie folks or something like them may be ancient alien encounters.
At least theoretically, something could be grown in a lab from cloned cells with a complex computer program running in a superconducting
3-D reactive lattice with sub quantum limit features, potentially less than 10cm on a side but with a truly insane number of connections
approaching that of a dozen human brains that can operate at a speed in the hundreds of GHz range if you measured on such a scale.
Once you've got that sort of technology, any organic body would work.
Grow the body around the "brain" so to speak, as the biological body matures the neural net becomes more complicated.
Supposedly there is an optimum level of intelligence for a companion animal: too little and they are no fun, might as well be plants; too much and you spend most of your time clearing up when they have worked out a new way of evading your ideas of reasonable behaviour. (Or from the other point of view, failed to meet their needs.)
There is a theory that domestic animals are already "optimised" with reduced intelligence compared to non-domesticated equivalents, perhaps because some survival behaviours aren't needed in a more controlled environment. (The same suggestion has been made about human evolution too.)
As for rewriting the genetics, at the current state of knowledge you'd be better doing it Nature's way with "monkeys and typewriters", Belyayev has given an example.
My read on several "Star Trek" stories is that increasing human intelligence or abilities artificially, typically creates people who are not good to have around in-universe. Gary Mitchell. Ricardo Montalban. Reg Barclay. Is that successful advancement has to come by natural and/or gradual development, and even then, a society can destroy itself. On this principle, uplifted animal people would tend not to be happy people, as well.
In Harry Harrison's quite light-hearted story, "The Man From P.I.G.", a space migrant pig farmer has just a few animals with him, and one of the pigs was genetically altered to have higher intelligence - for a pig - and is mentally unstable. Of course, a story is not evidence that there is a problem. It is an instance of the writer thinking that there is.
Couldn't they just identify as cats? The myth that some school pupils do so is so widespread that it has its own Wikipedia page, not to mention regular outings in the comments section of the Daily Mail, so perhaps it;s time someone actually did it?
Be careful what you wish for.
An actual "Catgirl" would be a nightmare. You thought regular cats were bad, now imagine something human sized but with
claws and teeth that would thoroughly ruin your day not to mention the quantity of hair you'd be picking up on a daily basis.
It would be like having a puma in the house, with a bad attitude and ninja like reflexes.
Not something you'd want to get on the wrong side of.
Don't even get me started on "That time of the month".. dial the claws and teeth up to 11.
It's morally equivalent to owning a sentient ape-slave from the "Planet of the Apes" sequel / prequels - if I got the originals straight, chimpanzee refugees from the Planet come to Earth and become the new Untouchable caste. In the remake, intelligent apes are created on Earth scientifically. Both times, it's judged that these beings have human feelings - more or less so, because they aren't human - but they don't get any kind of human rights.
I gather that starting in the original French novel in 1963, the "Planet of the Apes" gives gorillas, chimpanzees, and orang-utans specific roles in society, which is troublingly racial. It may or may not also be their class system. Wild humans survive; this planet's humans had made the apes intelligent and put them to work, which made it either practically or biologically unnecessary for humans to be intelligent as well. The apes rebelled and expelled the unintelligent humans from cities. Humans are not considered to be useful workers, although an ape experiment in space flight uses humans in a space capsule for a safety trial launch.
I'm uncomfortable with dominant-submissive relationships between humans, but if it's what people want to do, I may not have a right to criticise. But to create a creature designed only to be dominated is a step further. Of course, our existing relationships with animals can be troubling to look at; as our "companions", and as what Peter Davison was in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
A laboratory working with radiation can create mutations, but only random ones.
If they really wanted cat-girls, they'd ask somebody who was working with CRISPR.
So I think they should be described simply as pranksters. Although that's also not quite appropriate, given the amount of damage hacking does.
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